


If You're Going Through Hell

by wehavefound



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28614960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wehavefound/pseuds/wehavefound
Summary: When animal life dies out, the two remaining Cullens must trust in Alice's visions, trust her promise that she knew something was after this life, though she knew not what. Leave it to Alice to break out of hell and find her Jasper once more.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Comments: 3
Kudos: 11
Collections: Jalice Secret Santa 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluewhistlingthrush](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluewhistlingthrush/gifts).



> This is the Jalice secret santa for @idk-im-weird on tumblr! Hope you enjoy!

In a strange way, it made sense. To live forever is to outlive the very necessities of life after all. To eventually outlive the very planet itself. It didn’t make it easier, knowing that this was inevitable. It didn’t soothe the twist in his gut as he looked into Alice’s eyes. 

“We have to. This is the best way, I know it is,” she urged him, her hands clutching his ever tighter with her words. “We won’t have the presence of mind to do this. If we wait too long we won’t even be able to start a fire, not after the current blazes.” Her conviction pushed at him. Jasper knew she spoke true, knew how many of their deaths she must have seen in her future sight. It didn’t make it any easier. They had been together for thousands of years—his own death he could accept but not Alice’s. Not on purpose.

“We could starve. It wouldn’t kill us,” he said. Alice sighed and laid her head on his chest.

“A millennia drifting endlessly mad with thirst is worse than you can even imagine. It’ll work out, I know it will. There’s something beyond the end and I don’t know what but I can see it. I can see us there, standing in darkness but standing all the same. Maybe Carlisle was right. Maybe he’s in a paradise even now. We have to do it now, before we lose our nerve.”

Neither of them particularly had any nerve right now in the first place but she did have a point. Her emotions were a violently churning mix of fear, resignation, and anxiety shot through with the bright strength of earnest belief that always came when she had seen something so many times she knew the future wouldn’t change. Of course Alice’s visions were true, he didn’t doubt that, but was he strong enough to walk to his own death with his one brightness? Thousands of years and he was still amazed by the strength of her gift. Who else could thread the needle so carefully? Who else could know exactly what had to be done to avoid a fate worse than death? No, he didn’t want to walk willingly to his own death but he would follow her anywhere. Alice knew best. 

He cupped his hand around the bare skin of her neck and pushed as much love and hope and calm as he possibly could, pushed harder than he ever had before. If her gift would let them avoid endless torture then by God his gift would at least soothe the way. He could do this for her. He had too.

“Then let’s go. Now, before we can’t anymore. Just know I love you more than life itself.” Jasper said, his voice rough with choked back emotion. All the deaths he had seen—in the armies, in their former coven, in the volturi, the former nomads—none of them got to choose it peacefully, knowing there was something after for a fact. What a gift she had given him.

“I love you too. I’m glad we’ve had this long together. I wouldn’t change it for the world.” Her love bubbled up even stronger than before and maybe he was the one here meant to change emotions but her love soothed his hurt even as he did the same for her. They had come this far together. Thousands and thousands of years spent loving each other with all their heart and soul and he’d be dammed if he stepped into the afterlife feeling anything but adoration for the little pixie who had made it all possible. 

The concept of now was a softer one, after the clocks and time pieces of humans were gone and so they held each other for a good while. The sun made its trek across the sky overhead and the fires in the distance came closer as the shadows lengthened. A day spent holding each other closely and unmoving to bask in each other’s love in the end of times. The fear was long gone from both of them now. Who could be afraid with a partner so perfectly matched to each other as they were? It was as though they were made to walk into the darkness together, totally calm and knowing something waited on the other side for them. They could do this. They had to do this.

They didn’t break from each other till the sun was setting and the fires were within the mile. It was fitting that the end of their lives on earth should be under a blood red sky with none but themselves left to witness it. Something beautiful to carry with them. Alice moved first until they were hand in hand, arm against arm. There were no words left to say they had not said a thousand times over and so they stayed silently floating in the atmosphere of pure devotion. The fires were close now, the heat starting to warm the cold stone of their bodies. They would face it together and he would soothe her hurt until the very end even as his own body melted. 

He couldn’t breathe anymore. The smoke was too thick and the very scent of it made him want to bolt. He couldn’t even smell Alice by his side, though he could feel her pressed against him. Calm. Calm. Calm. Don’t think about it, don’t focus on the horrible screams that were starting to wrench themselves unwilling from their mouths as the first bits of fire reached them. He had to calm her. He could do this one final gift. But no, he couldn’t feel that extra sense he had always known anymore. The sunset was gone, covered by the flames. He couldn’t see anything else, couldn’t smell anything but smoke. All that was left was the feeling of her arm on his and yet Jasper couldn’t even turn his head to see her. Was Alice burning too? She had been screaming earlier but now he couldn’t hear anything. Maybe he had stopped screaming as well. He wouldn’t know the difference.

It was a strange feeling, dying. His senses were gone, his gift gone, but somehow he stayed, living in the hazy much of life and death, conscious only of the weight of Alice’s presence beside him, though he knew her body was as burnt as his. It was like falling asleep, slipping over the cliff of oblivion so slowly he did not even realize it was happening until he was dead.


	2. Chapter 2

The last thing Jasper Whitlock felt was Alice pressed against him. The first thing he felt in the afterlife was her absence. It seemed as though he was opening his eyes after a decade spent standing still. There was a sense that time had passed, a great deal of it, but when he looked he was back where it had all began. The south. 

The sun shone brightly overhead and in front of him a dozen vampires glittered brightly even as they tore each other to shreds. He recognized this battle. It was the first one he ever saw as a vampire and it seemed, the first one he saw in the afterlife. Could this be the promised afterlife? All alone in the hell that had started his second life? Alice had promised. They were meant to be together.

“Looking for someone?” A voice next to him asked. He turned to discover a woman was standing next to him. No emotion came from her and though she appeared solid there was some quality to her light that left no doubt that she was not really there, some shimmering tone to her skin so unlike the vampires in front of him. She was human and though he did not recognize her by face he knew somehow in his core that she was his mother.

“Alice.”

“You won’t find her. That girl was turned through no fault of her own. Alice is where better souls go. You don’t deserve it there. But then, I think you knew that already.”

She vanished immediately and before he could even process her words his body moved of its own volition. He was in the fray of the battle now, making the same stupid mistakes he had made when he fought it for the first time. He couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t will his stubborn body into obedience, could only feel the same terror crashing over him like a tsunami. So this was hell. Of course he hadn’t deserved Alice, he never had. She was always too good for him. He had fooled himself, thought that a thousand years of penance could cleanse his soul from the wrongs he’d done. And now he was alone. Forever.

Time went by strangely in the armies. His memories of life were starting to fade and he no longer knew how many decades he had fought. Perhaps he was past how much time he had spent here in life but either way, he knew he didn’t get to leave. There would be no miraculous rescue, no long lost righthand man to save him from the endless cycle of death.

This was who he was. This was what he deserved. The constant toil of pain and fear and death that he had never really escaped from. The constantly changing set of newborns, never around enough to grow used to the bloodshed and thus never allowing him to grow used to it either. In life he could at least descend mindlessly into the bloodshed, allow himself to bask in it. Here he had no such reprieve, no ability to shut off the stream of thoughts that compounded despair upon despair.

The only comfort he knew was the thought that Alice was where she deserved, was in bliss even as his memories began to slip from his unwilling grasp, even as he forgot their first meeting, their years spent cradling each other tenderly, all the little moments that made him want to be worthy of her love.

———

The last thing Mary Alice Brandon felt was Jasper pressed against her. The first thing she felt in the afterlife was his absence. She knew somehow that it had been a very long time since she last opened her eyes but when she waited unmoving, no vision came of what she would find.

“Looking for someone?” A man’s voice asked, startlingly close. It was an odd feeling, to be caught off guard.

“Jasper,” she said as she opened her eyes to discover a human man she had never seen before standing beside her. He was there but some aspect of him was lit wrong, some odd distortion of the light that gave her the deep conviction that he was not really.

“You don’t deserve him,” he said. “That boy was horrible as a human and violent as a newborn but when he was shown a better way he took it, hard as it was for him, and he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for his sins. But you? You only cared if your every whim was catered to, if you could manipulate everyone around you. Jasper is where better souls go. You don’t deserve it there.”

“Wait!” she cried, a vision flashing quickly of him vanishing before she could ask. So her sight wasn’t gone after all. “Who are you?”

“Why Mary,” he said. “I’m your father. ” And with that he vanished, leaving her alone in the pits of what she somehow knew to be the Volturi’s castle back when it had still existed, back in the beginning of her life. It was an unimaginable agony, to go on without Jasper. He had always been her north star, the guiding light that gave her a mission from the moment she first opened her eyes. But then, even now she was being selfish wasn’t she? Her first reaction to knowing Jasper was in a better place was to think of her own loneliness.

Even as she despaired her body seemed to move of its own will, climbing step after step until she emerged from the dungeons, kept traveling until at last she reached the throne room, filled with throngs of black coated guards, a mix of time periods leading to the largest group she had ever seen there. They were led by the three original kings, draped over their thrones in the same way they had upon her very first visit to Volterra.

“My dear dead Alice, so exciting to see you with us! You see, here can you have all the material things you could ever want! Fashion and cloaks and human blood to feast yourself on! You always were one for such indulgences.” The despair grew even stronger. She didn’t want this, she didn’t want any of those things. She wanted Jasper. She wanted love. She wanted him by her side, stepping into the next journey together. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

What was Jasper doing now, in that place where better souls go? Did he think of her? She had no control over her actions and so she stood by Aro’s side, his precious jewel. The only seer in his possession. She had the finest wardrobe, blood as often as she wanted it, books and dresses and riches aplenty. It was empty. There was no love here, no happiness, and so she found that her petty indulgences she had been so fond of when the humans had still been alive were like a bite reminding her of how little they truly mattered. How fitting that this should be her punishment.

The years blended together in one blur of empty meaningless nothing and so she took refuge in her gift, seeing choices she knew she could not bring herself to actually do. Her body obeying mindlessly, her mind adrift, lost in the endless sea of possibilities. A million failed escape attempts giving rise to the smallest kernel of hope buried so deep she could barely feel it. Perhaps one day she would see a successful one.

She was tortured for it of course, the witch twins present taking an unholy glee. But eventually, after minutes or months or millennia the torture would end and she would find herself tracing the futile paths once more.

—————

Eventually, she did. A glitch that shouldn’t have existed, a desperate flight before Aro could read it, and newfound freedom later she found herself tumbling through the solid rock of the castle walls and somehow ending above it, on a rickety metal catwalk that stretched endlessly into the distance in a haphazard patternless mess. Below her the Volturi paused, looking oddly see through, like dolls on a track that did not play without her. Beside them there was another scene, a forest filled with slightly transparent figures and one solid person. So this was it then. An infinite number of personal hells stretching into the distance, each fitting a huge quantity of space into what was really rather small when seen from outside.

She wandered there for some unknowable time, watching the figures move in each small world. There was no shared cycle, no one sense of time between the squares and so it was impossible to judge how long she had been with them. Her thirst was gone here, no desire with which to keep track. She simply walked.

What she was looking for it was impossible to say. There was no way out, no path she could see. Just endless hells over and over, each filled with one person in absolute misery. She thought sometimes about finding a way up, finding a way to the better place but then, was it not that sort of thinking that had landed her here in the first place? She did not deserve Jasper, could know show up to his joy to sully it with her selfishness. 

Eventually her memories began to fade back in. The first time they kissed. The last time they saw their family so long ago. The sunset above them as they died. She remembered her human life too but there was no attachment there, no feelings part of the film of her life. It was her, indisputably, but she felt nothing as she watched her own mistreatment at the hands of the asylum workers, at the hands of her father. It was oddly relaxing, watching her own life over and over, the thousands of years passing through her head as her feet wandered aimlessly through millions of matching tortures.

It was not until her third play through that her vision interrupted, roughly shoving an image of the near future at her, of the sort of rock solid quality that came from visions that were determined to force their way into reality. Jasper. He was here, was only a few tens of thousands of hells down.

She took off at once, flying down the metal as though possessed, even as she realized he should not be here. How long had she spent believing he was in a better place? How much faster could she have found him had she looked more carefully? She had believed it, had believed the lie that was undoubtably part of her own hell.

His square was a sunny desert on the edge of sunset, vampires glinting faintly in the fading light. They were fighting, a grand battle taking place even as she watched, newborns and a few older vampires alike ripping into each others limbs. She could not hear it, not from here, but the screaming was evident, the fear rippling through their slightly translucent faces. Only he was solid, off on the fringes of battle, along the pyres billowing thick purple smoke.

He couldn’t hear her, couldn’t see her up here. She had to go to him and so she jumped, following her sight to know she would land safely. The world snapped into clarity the moment she made contact with the warm sand beneath her. The closest newborn to her reacted, abandoning the smaller boy she had been attacking and lunging for Alice’s throat. She dodged her easily, not even bothering to finish the threat before she darted off to where she knew him to be, though he was still hidden in the smoke. 

The moment he came into view felt like coming home, like there should be trumpets and angels singing above her. This was divinity, this was the most holy experience possible, to see her soulmate again after so long separated. She belonged with him on every level, with every atom in her body. As though her very flesh had been screaming for him for so long she did not register the physicality of her need until it was gone.

“Jasper!” she screamed, reaching her hand out for him. He stood straight immediately, whipping around with a speed she hadn’t thought possible even for a vampire. His blood red eyes met hers and the joy that surged immediately brought the entire battle to a standstill. The newborns froze, moving only to stare at the source of sudden happy contentment so unheard of in this place.

“Alice,” he said, taking her hand immediately. “Alice.” In that moment nothing else existed. Not the glaring sun, not the dozens of vampires surrounding them, not the thousands and thousands of years that had gone by. Only the man she loved staring into her eyes with tender love as though she had not brought him here. 

The world stood still for a long moment, Jasper’s gift protecting them once more. So intense was the happiness he projected that not even the ghostly apparitions around them could move for the force of it . Even as they embraced Alice was flickering through options. She would find a way out. Anything for Jasper, to free him from this hell. A few visions later and found the confirmation she needed, that the glitch she herself had exploited was universal. A small square in a distant corner that appeared solid, a patch through which their salvation lay.

“This way!” She tugged him, trusting the headstart would let them make it. The newborns broke only when his power reached the end of its distance, chasing hopelessly behind, stopping only when he followed her through in a leap of faith, falling deep into the ground and coming out of their freefall above where they had started.

The catwalk was barely wide enough for the two of them to land side by side above the frozen still desert they had just left. It seemed to good to be true, to be back in the endless nothingness void with all she could ever need cradling her close. She wanted not for creature comforts, for material desires, wanted only the steady hand holding her firmly. It was beyond her wildest dreams to have found him once more. So this was what it felt like to find heaven.

“Alice, I’m so sorry I—” Jasper spoke, clutching at her as though he was afraid she would vanish any second now. His hands were warm still, firm and comforting against her.

“No, don’t. They lied to us, we were both down here, Jasper. I escaped a long while ago but I thought you were in a better place,” she replied. 

“The only better place is where you are, Alice. All those years thinking this was my own fault, that I was a monster to want you back. I never stopped thinking of you, however difficult it was to remember.” 

“You’ll always be my guiding path,” she replied, burying her face in his chest, realizing a moment afterwards that even here, even thousands of years of a never changing hell later, they weren’t so different as that last day on Earth under a blood red sky. Their love would always be, the same as it has since the very beginning, since the first time she held a hand out to him and he took it. Her world would only ever be Jasper and she knew she would always be his.

They stayed together, embracing as the ghostly hells around them flickered with their own individual cycles, holding each other close enough to forget the terrors of all that they had been through. They could stay here forever in this strange not-place and know that nothing would ever separate them again. They had each other and that was all they could ever want for.

And so they went forth into forever.


End file.
